I also plan on making seed tapes this year. I’ve developed a taste for orderly rows that are easy to mulch. I don’t have enough patience to plant each individual seed and always end up scattering them. Then I either live with the really spotty coverage that gives, or I dig them up and make nice neat rows. I think just having the tapes from the beginning will make a difference on having to dig things up. I’ve come to realize that proper spacing makes a difference on how things grow, especially lettuces!

I try to avoid talking tech on here. I get most of that out of my system during my day job. Yet, my recent foray into running Linux again has me needing to vent. Roughly a year ago, I switched over to Windows 7 for the sake of “it just works”. Now, a strong desire to continue on some of my hobby projects, as well as web and server-side scripting development has led me to reinstalling Linux. I tried the “linux in a vm” for a bit. Sadly, the performance just kinda sucked. A second linux partition is a lot cheaper than a kvm switch and new computer.

Who the hell took over development in the Linux world? When I left Gnome, KDE and friends were getting more usable and awesome by the day. Now, it’s like someone took a look at the user interface hall of shame, noted all the worst ideas, and puked them out onto a desktop. One would think with all the backing and developer support, the basic menu items would all be tested and work relatively well. Nope, I see random apps with text overflowing (leaving critical portions unaccessible in non-resizable windows), random installation failures when installing “gold” packages, and what appears to be a 5th rewrite of device management where I _STILL_ can’t easily browse detected hardware. Somehow, developers have managed to wade 10 years in the same shallow waters while Microsoft and Apple got their shit together and made some decent stuff.

Myopic developers and “UI designers” continue to piss all over the basic idioms “lusers” know, and ignore power users that want things simple. I’d be better with /etc being a mass of binary blobs with FUNCTIONING UIs, as opposed to randomly generated shell fragments with half-assed GUIs attempting to gather the pieces, happily trouncing changes I’d like to make in a sea of “GENERATED FILE DO NOT EDIT” comments. Then, we have the fun of a default theme that leaves me simultaneously straining my eyes to read anything at all and finding random windows with obnoxious huge text overflowing their overly tight boundaries.

Given the number of developers being paid to develop this shit, it’s shocking the complete advancement from high school and college students doing all the real work in the mid to late 90s. After being paid to do linux kernel development work for the day job, I know there’s some advancement going on under the hood. I also know that when writing a driver, 95% of your time is spent tracking random “fixes” in a source control system that makes IRS tax forms look user friendly.

So far, Linux Mint is proving at least moderately usable compared to the travesty that is Ubuntu and Unity. I’m looking for an alternative to Gnome3 currently – waiting for KDE and XFCE to install. If neither of those don’t work out – I’ve got some old backups of a fvwm95 configuration and a Debian stable download going.

Linux needs FUNCTION, not wiggly windows with drop shadows and a full OpenGL rendered spinning cube for a mouse cursor. I use my computer for work, not masturbating to graphics algorithms.

GH is lower….KH is higher. The water softner pillow did lower the GH, not the KH tho, from what I can tell.

tds = 468temp = 75.3

Temp is the same. The tds has increased. After doing some reading that seems to be the case. I tried the peat granuals and all they did was raise the tds to way over 500. So, I am down to buying reverse osmosis water from a big box store. I may do some more testing with peat at a later time, but not the stuff you buy at the pet stores.

Values for replacement water:

GH = turned color on the first dropKH = turned final color on the first dropTDS = 31

So basically no hardness to this water at all. I will be mixing it with my water to keep the GH and KH at a reasonable level so I don’t end up with a PH crash in this tank. I’m trying to keep the TDS around 100.

This the thread I’ve been reading to try to copy his results. His water values are higher then mine are but I am also trying to breed crystal red shrimp and pygmy cories.

The TDS of the tank was 355 after the water change so there’s no reason to check the other values. I will be doing weekly water changes to get that value down slowly.

The cories were super active after the water change, they are young yet tho, so probably won’t see a spawn from them until this spring at the earliest.

I got a new case for my phone and shortly after downloaded the Blogger app for my phone. I noticed that the pics I’ve been uploading have had some weirdness to them that I attributed to the screen over the lenses on my phone. I removed the screen thinking that would help. Not so much, still the weirdness with the pictures. I cleaned the lenses really good thinking that might help, it didn’t. I tried messing with the settings on my phone but couldn’t see anything that might be affecting it.

I did some looking and noticed that I was uploading pictures just fine to Facebook and Picasso, but not to Blogger. I realized that I could change the picture setting on the Blogger app to upload my original pictures, and bam, problem solved.

I have no idea what the Blogger app was doing to my pictures but changing that setting seems to have fixed things. Posts with pics seem to take slightly longer to upload now, but at least you can see what I was taking the picture of. Not that my camera phone is that amazing, but its sure better then Blogger was making it out to be!

I will be going through and reuploading the pics from the messed up posts probably tomorrow, and shouldn’t be seeing this problem in the future.

I’ve had my chicks for only 24 hours now and already find them so interesting. Nature is amazing to me, providing new and interesting every day.

Some of my chicks hatched Tuesday, some Wednesday and some Thursday. They are mostly all acting the same, even though some are a bit older then others. It’s amazing to me that with no mother to teach them how things work they already know. They scratch the ground and peck at it for food. They well regulate how hot or cold they are by moving toward or away from the heat lamp. They drink, automatically like birds.

I’m not sure why I find all this quite as amazing as I do. The instinct on these little creatures is amazing to behold. They hold such great interest and intelligence in their eyes that it just astonishes me.

I’ve been around other peoples chickens before, seen how they act and interact, heard watching them called chicken tv. I never exactly got it, but I truly do now. Watching chickens be chickens is a lot of fun. They run away if you make sudden movements, but come right back to inspect what you are doing. They let me pick them up and magically bed down and fall asleep if you cover them in your hand. They like to be scratched.

I fully intend on making pets out of these guys, they are my future egg layers. Even the roosters will find a productive place in life, some in the freezer and some breeding a future line of chicks. I want them to have the best life possible, no matter what their future destiny.

I already have plans for future plantings into the yard and garden beds and boxes for them. I am hoping to improve the “grass” in my yard with great diversity so that these guys have plenty to eat while they free range. I am hoping to grow several different kinds of crops to both supplement their foraging and store for winter.